I love Windows Vista, aside from the fact that it's much too bloated and insecure for my taste. The only reason I haven't switched over to Linux yet is because AutoCAD doesn't make a version for Linux and there's no Windows emulator that will allow me to run it in Linux.
Microsoft gave me another reason to shy away from their next version of Windows.
I built a server last week to back up my laptop and my wife's computer to. After finding a video card on eBay and having it arrive on Thursday, I took for granted the motherboard had an on-board video card and in my haste to clean my office threw out a gigantic box of old computer parts, I got the thing booted up and installed Xubuntu.
Installation was a breeze, as was getting it set up so my two Windows computers could communicate with it. I have to say, Linux is extremely user-friendly and it actually works. Imagine that! I was able to see the 400GB backup drive I installed in the server and was also able to drag and drop files to it from both computers.
The problem came when I tried to set up a backup using the built in Windows Backup and Restore Center. When I told it to back up to the server, it insisted I enter a user name and password. I set it up so no name and password was required. After an hour of frustration, I decided to Google the situation only to find out that Vista absolutely will not back up to a networked storage device.
No wonder I kept getting that damned message "Cannot create a file that already exists." Whenever I entered a name and password using the Backup and Restore center, it would throw up that message and create a folder on the server. It made absolutely no sense at all. This is something Microsoft needs to fix.
I ended up downloading AceBackup 2 instead.
It's extremely easy to use. All I had to do was click the C: drive and D: drive on my laptop, point it to the destination folder on the server, and that was it! Best of all, it's free!
I started backing up my laptop at around 4:30 yesterday afternoon and it says I still have twenty-three minutes and just over 1GB of information to go. This is completely my fault though because I don't do those pansy-ass work file backups. I back up the entire drive. That being that, this backup has taken fifteen hours and forty-five minutes so far, and that's only backing up 44GB of data. I've got it set to only backup the information that's actually changed or is new for future backups, so they'll go lickety-split. I imagine backing up over my wireless network isn't helping all that much either. It's averaging only 1MB per second.
My wife's computer has just over 150GB to back up. I imagine hers will still be running tomorrow when I wake up to go to work. I started it last night at 9:00 and an hour later when I went to bed, it said it was going to take over 24 hours to complete.
My other option, as mentioned in a previous post, was to buy new backup software for my wife's computer and buy a new backup drive for my laptop. That would have run me over $150 and there would have been two backup drives to have to keep up with. I had an old computer laying around. The only things I had to buy were the video card and a new IDE cable for the hard drives. I borrowed a 15" monitor from work, Xubuntu is free, can't get any better than that.
I have to write a script though to allow me to access the server's desktop from another computer. It works the same way as the remote desktop feature on Windows. This is going to allow me to remove the keyboard, mouse, and the monitor from the server, making it "headless". No sense having everything hooked up to it when I'm not going to be using it.
I'm hooking my black and white laser printer to it so I don't have to take the laptop back into my office and manually hook it up whenever I have to print anything. It'll be nice to have the capability to print over the network. I may even go all-out and put my wife's all-in-one printer on it as well.
Anyway, long story short, It's finally done and I'm happy. Now we can take comfort in the fact that our computers are backed up and again and our data is safe.
23 hours ago
4 Replies:
No doubt, you are a computer buff. That whole post was like a totally foreign language to me. Glad there are peoplein the world such as yourself that can decipher all of that ...stuff. The steak dinner never came about. The neurologist retired and shortly after passed away. I'm planning a visit with her on the other side. All in all, she was way out there, but surely knew her stuff. Just didn't know how to go about being positive about it. Thanks again for the comments and the dirt. B
getting the kinks worked out and back up system set in place is a good feeling, now comes the remembering to do it part... hopefully its a program that can schedule for a set time, that would make it too easy...
I've been thinking of doing something like this, could you explain to me in a bit more detail how you did it (I have a cheap laptop running Xubuntu), although I want to host a private one/HTTP Proxy that I can access from the internet.
Reason I'm here is, well, this is one of the first hits on google and you seem to know your linux better than I do (Xubuntu is my first Linux install and I've had it for a month).
Eric, just read through some of the other posts I made about it. Use the search box in the upper right side of my blog. I gave up on it in the end because I had nothing but problems with every single Linux distro I installed. I don't know if it was my hardware making it constantly crash or what, but I was losing data left and right and a lot of times it just wouldn't boot and I'd have to reinstall, etc.
I ended up buying a NAS hard drive and now back up to it. So much easier. I use Memeo AutoBackup, which runs in the background and constantly backs everything up on the fly as changes are made.
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